St. Paul’s Chapel is the oldest continuously-used public building in New York City, yet it’s the place where some of the newest things at Trinity are happening. Each week during Lent I want to explore some small changes that create big discoveries.

Money is a powerful symbol, even in church. Every Sunday every church collects an offering of money for the work of the church. Many a stewardship sermon, from the early Church Fathers onward, have made much of the connection between our money and our selves --I think it was St. Augustine who preached that when the collection plates were carried forward it was as if everyone in the assembly had jumped on the plates, that we are offering our whole selves, symbolized in our gifts.

(Here’s a liturgical principle to put in your back pocket, one I return to often when evaluating liturgy: the shorter the distance between the symbol and its referent the stronger the power of that symbol. For instance, real bread in the Eucharist is a more direct and accessible symbol of Christ the Bread of Life than the styrofoam-like wafers that church-supply companies offer.)

So at St. Paul’s we linked that principal to the offertory: If presenting money in church is more than just a collection method, but is a symbol of presenting ourselves, then why not shorten the distance and actually present ourselves along with our money?
Since we were already gathering around the altar at St. Paul’s to sing the Eucharistic Prayer, it was a relatively small and easy switch to make: to place the offering basket on the altar empty instead of carrying it through the congregation, and then to invite people to make their offering when they came up to the Table. But the change was instant and visible. Energetically, we switched from ‘taking a collection’ to ‘making an offering’.

Sunday by Sunday now there is this wonderful, very visible moment, where everyone goes close up to the Table, touches it, and leaves their gift behind. It might be a widow’s mite, but it’s clear to me from their faces, and from the way they move toward the Table, that something important is happening. No discursive explanation needed; we experience the offering in our bodies. My favorite is young children, since their faces always hide less than adults: the anxiety at suddenly being so public, the hesitant but eager steps toward the Table. Placing the money in the basket with a sudden flash of a smile as if a great Triumph has suddenly been achieved, and the dash back to the parents’ arms.

Such a small change; such a great result. And some of the best part of these changes is they are accidental discoveries. They happen only because we, the liturgy planners, have been attentive and curious, not because we are smart or highly-trained. It also takes Time. Sometimes these little changes feel like they are gestating for months before we can articulate them.

Next week: Discovering that the OFF switch is the most important control on a sound system.

Manhattan is a strange beast for so many reasons. Nowhere else have I lived where people are so generally irreligious and yet swarm the church on Ash Wednesday. At Trinity we mark the foreheads of about 15,000 people in 12 hours. Given how hard we collectively seem to be avoiding the reality of our mortality, it’s amazing that so many come.

It’s an extraordinary opportunity to stand in one spot for an hour shift and say over and over to every stripe of human being “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s hard not to ‘get it’ after you’ve said it a few hundred times.

What struck me most this year was the standard response of about 80 percent of the people; it wasn’t “Amen,” it was “Thank you.”

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

"Thank you.”

What were they thanking me for? For the favor of being a dispensary? Something more. The “thank you” felt real, and meant, not perfunctory. Through the hour of my shift I started paying more and more attention; being more intentional with my eye contact, making sure I at least offered a split-second connection with the person, which seemed to deepen their response as well.

I remember the first time I got ashes as an evangelical college kid who had no previous exposure to the language of sacrament. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Scrape, scrape. Like a moment of conversion, I felt this huge weight slide off my back. Mortality felt like liberation and invitation at the same time: there was no point in perfection, because seasons pass quickly, and I would be dust soon. Life was Now. I’m sure I didn’t say Thank You, but I meant it.

15,000 people came to Trinity to get marked with ashes for a reason, even if they do not know entirely what it is. I don’t know their reasons either, but I know their instinct: when people can touch and be touched, when they can use their bodies to speak a soul language, something is transacted at the very center of life that transcends creed. That split-second eye contact, my ashy thumb on their soon-to-be-dust forehead, “Thank you.” In the midst of a sign of death we were sharing Communion, which is at the heart of life.

Yesterday I returned from a week of personal time in Guatemala, a land where the beauty, complexity and contradiction of life is visible in its extremes. I was working in Guatemala 20 years ago after college and it was there that I felt my first clear call to priesthood. The call came from an unlikely direction: the sprawling outer limits of the Guatemalan church, where the faded imperial Spanish Catholic forms held an older and very much alive Mayan religious reality.

I pulled at one of those twisting threads a few days ago when my husband Javier and I traveled into the one of the most traditional areas of the Mayan highlands. I wanted to show him that unique Guatemalan religious blending at the shrine of San Simon or Ma Ximon, a sort of renegade saint, who is an older Mayan deity overlaid or syncretized with the disciple Judas! He is sort of a patron saint of unrepentant sinners. Ma Ximon’s statue does not live in the church with the other saints, but is housed in a moving location, and he has his own priests, or cofrades, who guard and care for the shrine. We asked around town for his whereabouts, and found him a few kilometers out of town in a stucco shed decorated vividly with streamers and dried gourds.

The statue itself is a primitive carving, draped with scarves and neckties, with hats stacked on its head, all brought as gifts. Remembering the protocol, I had brought a pack of cigarettes, and one of the cofrades opened the pack, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stuck it in the saint’s mouth, carefully knocking off the ash throughout our visit.

On the great processional days when all the saints get brought out of the church and paraded around town, Ma Ximon always joins the procession, sidling in with his sacredly drunken priests and marching through the streets with the whole tilted band of wooden and human saints as they celebrate with dented trumpets and clouds of incense, and melting away down a side alley back to his shrine when the procession crosses the threshold of the church steps.

Popular liturgy like this says so much; it often speaks a different truth than the official dogma and is worth paying attention to. Ma Ximon demonstrates how people and categories who get written out of the story, who are refused a place at the table, always find ways to write themselves back in. The instinct that we are all beloved children of God is at least as strong as the instinct that some are sheep and some are goats.

The messy comprehensiveness of the church in Guatemala helped me discover my call; I wanted to work in a part of the church that spoke its particular language boldly, yet at the same time realized that God was already having a conversation with all of humanity and that our collective call was to listen and learn as well as speak. I was attracted to the Episcopal Church’s wonderful comprehensiveness, messy and ungainly at times, but ultimately in pursuit of truth as God continues to unfold it, one which follows scripture’s trajectory of ever-widening circles of belonging, and Jesus’ own controversial example of breaking bread with the wrong people.

I suppose with that pack of cigarettes I had just technically sacrificed to idols, and my childhood Sunday School teachers who had taught me to color within straight but narrowly drawn lines would have felt a disheartening sense of failure, but I experience something profound in Ma Ximon’s tenacious endurance despite the official church’s attempts to stamp him out.

Talk of our own imminent sign-on-the-line Anglican Covenant promises more exclusion and division than it seeks to heal, but I’m not losing much sleep over it; the banished will continue to discover themselves loved by God and will continue to write themselves back into the story. Ma Ximon will keep joining the parade!

I think one of my Lenten projects will be to look for him around the edges of church.

Last week we convened the Trinity Institute, a confab of lay and clergy from around the country who gather annually around a topic and a few notable speakers. We always launch with an opening Eucharist, and this year the Prayers of the People were led by someone from Winnepeg, Manitoba. That in itself is not notable except that the person was IN Winnepeg, Manitoba, and we skyped them in on the internet. 

I’m no stranger to the web (though I was born before computers had screens, and I’m only 45!), but like many at Trinity, when Jim Cooper steps out each Sunday to welcome the congregation in the nave “along with those worshipping with us on the internet,” I never really quite take that last phrase seriously. It’s not that I don’t believe those people are out there somewhere, but being invisible they are somewhat imaginary to me.

But with that skyped-in leader of prayer last week my imagination was enlarged. The monitor image was a little fuzzy and the sound was scratchy, but it was Real, not imaginary, and our internet congregation came alive for me in a new way.

After the service, Linda, the head of our Communications department, came up to me and said “What did you think? Could we do that on a Sunday?” “Of Course!” I blurted without pause. We have over a thousand people every week at the other end of those servo-controlled camera lenses that are perched on the pillars; it’s this great cloud of witnesses that we easily take for granted because we cannot see them. Why not perform the miracle and give them a face and a voice?!

Worship is practice, and practice is discovery, and discovery is change. I discovered something new last week, and what we discover if we start skyping our virtual congregation in on a Sunday I don’t entirely know, but I do know that we WILL discover something important, and that it will change us.

God is where the paint is still wet.

Stay tuned...

Last week I had business in Jerusalem, where I lived for a year back in my 20s, and had opportunity to revisit many old hangouts, one of which was the Church of the Resurrection (to the Orthodox) aka the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (to the Catholics).

Many things have changed in the Holy Land in the past twenty years; this church reliably has not. The place is full of irony, as the most holy site of Christendom is joked to be one of the most un-Christian places in the world. There are still ladders propped in the corners of the edifice that have not been moved for over a hundred years because the warring Christian factions who have joint custody of the place cannot agree whose right it is to move them. I have seen fistfights break out between Orthodox and Catholic monks over perceived territorial trespasses.

This past week I watched dueling choirs perform. Each of the six or seven sects that control the church has their prescribed hour for devotion at the end of the day, and they claim their space with ferocity. I walked in when the Franciscans were chanting the closing rite over the slab of anointing, shushing tourists in between their lines of refined gregorian chant. The Armenian orthodox monks steamed in like a train behind them, bellowing their harmonies like rugby players in a scrum. They anchored themselves across the church from the Franciscans and both groups sang away in a cacophony of clashing modal music.

When the whole ungainly vision has passed on, I went into the Holy Sepulcher to light a candle, and sang an old Byzantine song under my breath that I learned at St. Gregory’s and we sang every Easter: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on the tombs bestowing life.” And I felt a little electricity as I touched the cold slab, polished and greasy with so many hands over the centuries.

Most tourists are appalled when they discover this shrine is such a wreck and a tangle. Where this used to trouble me, now it just seems a wonderful icon of Christ’s broken body being made whole. We might not represent him well, but still he gathers us together in one motley beautiful mess: the tax collectors and harlots, and even the monks. We are often not singing the same song, and are competing for attention, and are often missing the point of the Resurrection with our dueling chants, which somehow, sometimes helps me believe that Resurrection is real and all around us, happening in so many small assorted ways that elude our capture. I no longer expect pristine piety at the Holy Sepulcher, or any other church for that matter. As the angel said at the tomb to the disciples, “He is not here; he is Risen.” Christ is still out there, healing in the streets, forgiving, bestowing life on the tombs of our resistance, and sometimes even using us to accomplish it!

It was especially pronounced this past week during Christmas liturgies, when the front third of the pews, made up mostly of visitors, heard the rustle behind them during the prayer and turned around to discover most of the church already kneeling, and hastened to kneel themselves, all while the Celebrant was praying “you have made us worthy to stand before you.”

There are still a few members of the drafting group of the current Book of Common Prayer around who describe that the authors of that “stand or kneel” rubric acknowledged a wide variety of practice, preferenced standing by placing that rubric first, and intended that whichever posture prevailed would create a unified practice in a congregation --it was less about individual piety than local option). Most churches, however, have not wanted to tackle a conversation with strongly felt opinion on both sides and have left it to individual preference to sort it out, and copy the “the People stand or kneel” rubric into their bulletins.

A strength of our church is that it values individual piety and has a range of practice that spans the gamut. Another strength is that we value collective, unified action, and we know that how we pray together (with our bodies) teaches us who we are together as a community. As the title of one of my seminary liturgy texts framed it: “Praying Shapes Believing.”

From my view at the altar there is clear confusion week by week on the faces of many people, as they try to figure out whether to stand or kneel, and there is a visual and audible cacophony long into the prayer.

I don’t really know what the answer is to our dilemma. It will probably be awhile until we discern how we are called to support both individual piety and unified action. How do we do so in a way that is generous and clear, without being confusing to many? One thing is for sure: Praying shapes Believing. And the lively discussion, if we do it well, will be part of that praying.

This past Sunday I was presiding at Trinity’s 9 a.m. service, and the Vicar, Anne Mallonee, was preaching. She preached a lively sermon meant to especially engage our choristers, as well as link to the adult congregation in the pews.

During her sermon Anne moved up near the choristers at the top end of the chancel to engage them directly, and then shuttled back to the congregation in the pews to elaborate a point. She had to navigate a massive altar and huge flanking floral arrangements, and while she danced well around the set pieces, I felt like I was watching a battle. Anne struggled valiantly against the scale of the building and placement of bolted down furniture to keep this congregation together, but she was fighting a losing battle.

Architects (and liturgists) quip that when you try and fight the building the building always wins. In Trinity’s case we are trying to hold a service for 80 people in a building that holds 10 times that many. We are trying for a warmer intimacy in a space where people are sitting a dozen feet from one another and seeing only the back of each other’s heads, with the action happening a flight of stairs away.

So I’m musing now: how do we dance with this beautiful old building and not fight it? Honor it’s bones while still living into what God is calling us to become in this moment? One of my mentors is fond of saying: “If you can’t move the pews, move the people!” -- maybe the choristers could all come down to join the congregation for the sermon -- maybe the congregation could use the chancel area for this liturgy. Every choice we make will have consequences -- costs and benefits. The benefit of being able to see one another’s faces as we worship, and the benefit of being able to gather together around the Table as we share the meal, both seem worth the cost of learning some new dance steps!

Yesterday I went to look up a sermon from a week ago at Trinity, which I hadn’t seen since I was presiding up the street at St. Paul’s. I don’t usually watch our weekly webcast, but I had heard so much about this one that I had to go and take a look for myself. Watch it for yourself:

Our rector, Jim Cooper, was preaching on the text from Isaiah --Every mountain shall be made low and ever valley shall be lifted up— and was applying it our own cooperation with God’s ongoing work in the world of making the dehumanizingly rough places plain.

He wrapped up his sermon with a characteristically inventive twist: he asked Virginia, one of our Trinity Choir members, to give us Marvin Gaye’s interpretation of this text, with the refrain to his song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

Virginia was ready, and picked up a mic and belted out a spirited a cappella rendition of the refrain. By her third word the congregation started clapping in time; when she finished they gave her hoots and applause.

It appeared that Jim had intended to let Virginia close out the sermon, but he stepped back to the center of the altar and started preaching again on the heels of the applause. And he Preached! Layer after layer of exclamation and repetition in that great call-and-response style of many African-American churches. And the people answered back; they echoed his cadence with claps and Amens, and they applauded more when he finished. This was definitely NOT a Trinity norm, and it is certainly didn’t follow the stereotype that others hold of us!

What happened? Something took hold of the people and the preacher that caused them to behave in ways they normally didn’t. It was the content for sure; Jim was tapping into our greatest hopes and expectations; it was the spirited style for sure; Enthusiasm is contagious!
But what I noticed most keenly, obvious even on television, is how the temperature of the room changed when people participated in visual, vocal ways. There was an engagement that woke everyone up, and couldn’t be suppressed.

Watching this made me reclaim again the conviction that the participation that matters in liturgy is participation that you can see, hear, and touch. Participation by appreciation is good for art galleries, but it’s not enough for church. We need to let the lid off more often! More Amens, Please! 

Feature photo courtesy of Dianis Matisons via Flickr.